Honorific Agreement. 9 Here and henceforth the pipe symbol ‘|’ in glosses marks the boundaries of sentences. Honorific Agreement (Xxxxxxx forthcoming) or HON3pl-C (Houtzagers 2018) essentially is a type of semantic agreement. It is found in a construction used for referring to people with a higher social rank, predominantly in 19th century Russian.10 Consider [16]: [16] государын-я xxxxx-xx-ся empress(F)-SG.NOM dress-3PL-refl ‘The empress is getting dressed’ (Druzhinina, Xxxxxxx, Sorotkina Gardemariny, Vpered! 1987, Russian National Corpus) In [16] a maid is referring to the empress while addressing another maid. The controller государыня ‘empress’ is a singular noun, however the target predicate verb одеваются ‘dress’ is in plural. Nothing in the featural specification of the controller could possibly induce the plural agreement expressed on the target, it is therefore the speaker’s obligation to show respect that determines the use of plural. The discussion of HA in literature is rather limited. It is consistently mentioned in publications by Xxxxxxx (1983, 2009, 2010, forthcoming), but only as part of the evidence for the Agreement Hierarchy. Houtzagers (2018:7-9) briefly describes HA as a subtype of honorific constructions found in Slavic and points out the absence of sources where the construction and its origin are reviewed in detail. It is crucial to differentiate the HA construction from the far more widely known polite plural construction, which was already mentioned in Section 2.2.3. The major difference between the two is that the HA occurs only in reference to a respected person, whereas polite plural is utilised in a direct address. Moreover, there is no agreement mismatch with polite plural,11 e.g. [17], as the target verb agrees with the plural controller, thus the agreement is syntactic: [17] Polite plural Вы xxxxx-x-x xxxx 0XX xxxxxxxx-XXX-XX 0XX.XXX ‘You surprised me’ 10 More information on the time frame of usage of HA follows at the end of Section 3.1.1.
Honorific Agreement. Normally Korean is considered to be one of those languages that lack agreement (e.g., Japanese, Chinese, etc). It is true that Korean does not have subject-verb agreement and does not have agreement affixes (for person, number, and gender). But there is another kind of agreement that some re- searchers have argued to involve agreement mechanism. This is Honorific Agreement. Honorific agreement in Japanese and Korean has been claimed by many researchers (Harada 1976, Shibatani 1977, Xxxxxxx 1990, Boeckx & Ni- inuma 2004 for Japanese; Ahn 2002 and references therein for Korean). These researchers have claimed that honorific agreement involves at least some kind of syntactic agreement. Arguments for this are first, when both indirect object and direct object are present, only indirect object can trigger honorific agreement on the predicate (Xxxxxxx 1990, Boeckx & Xxxxxxx 2004 among others).
